STAR WARS can be used to sell almost anything, from Lego to a career in policing. Fort Worth’s police department released a recruitment video on its Facebook page in December featuring an officer at target practice with a stormtrooper. The white-clad soldiers are notoriously poor shots, and the video shows the galactic GI missing every attempt he makes until he creeps so far forward that his goggles are very nearly touching his target. When the exasperated officer asks “who referred you to us?” Darth Vader peeks out from the back of the room, shaking his helmeted head in disgust. The scrolling text at the end of the video, which has garnered 17m views thus far, urges: “Join our Force! If you have what it takes to be a Fort Worth Police Officer and are a better aim than a Stormtrooper.” The advert underscores a serious problem affecting police forces nationwide. Economic and social changes have made it harder for police departments to keep their forces fully staffed, and lead to increasingly desperate recruitment.

The Los Angeles Police Department was short of nearly 100 officers as of mid-December—only 1% of its total workforce, but still enough to be felt on the ground, says Captain Alan Hamilton, who runs recruitment for the department. Philadelphia had 350 vacancies, largely due to a spate of retirements. Last spring, Dallas cancelled two academy classes for lack of applicants; its preliminary applications dropped by over 30% between 2010 and 2015. In 2012, the ratio of police officers to population hit its lowest level since 1997, according to Uniform Crime Reporting Programme data published by the FBI.

The dynamics underpinning the shortages vary by department, but there are national trends making it harder for police forces to attract applicants. The first is a strong economy. Nelson Lim, a researcher at the RAND Corporation, a think-tank, says this is nothing new. When plenty of jobs are available, people are usually less motivated to enter dangerous professions. Police forces as well as the armed forces tend to field less interest in boom times.

The second is the perception of increased danger associated with policing: 135 officers were killed in the line of duty between January 1st 2016 and December 28th 2016—a 10% increase from 2015 but fewer than the 192 killed in 2007. Shooting deaths increased from 41 to 64. Several of them were high profile and gruesome, such as the assassination of five Dallas police officers in July 2016. “When you look around the nation and you see the acts of violence directed at police officers—it makes people reluctant to join. Many people join the profession when they’re 22 or 23 when parents still have a heavy influence,” says Scott Walton, deputy chief in Dallas, though sympathy can also boost recruitment. Dallas has seen an uptick in applications since its officers were attacked.

The last is the image of policing. The deaths of several unarmed black men at the hands of police officers and the ensuing backlash seem to have made police work less appealing. “We have a situation where law enforcement is being scrutinised more heavily,” says Mr Hamilton of the LAPD. According to Gallup, a polling organisation, trust in law enforcement generally has remained fairly stable since it began surveying the topic in 1993. But according to data collected by Harris, another polling group, the share of both whites and blacks who believe that African Americans are discriminated against by the police has risen markedly between 1969 and 2014.

Baltimore Police Department’s officer shortage led it to Puerto Rico in search of fresh faces. The department also mulled relaxing its stance on past marijuana use. Chicago has cut its minimum age requirement for its police academy from 25 to 21. Several departments have lowered educational requirements for recruits. If President-elect Trump follows through on his promises to beef up military and infrastructure spending, the plight of police departments might worsen, worries Mr Lim. The armed and police forces tend to compete for applicants. If more jobs become available in industry and construction, putting on a badge might become even less appealing to young workers.

Several Broward Sheriff’s Office deputies who have been criticized for not entering the Florida school where a gunman killed 17 people were ordered to set up an outside perimeter by a district commander.

Officers from the Coral Springs Police Department claim when they arrived at the scene, three Broward deputies were behind their vehicles with their pistols drawn but had not entered the building.

A dispatch log indicates BSO’s Parkland District Commander Captain Jan Jordan ordered the deputies to set up a perimeter around the school when they believed the shooter was still inside. But a BSO training manual lists the first priority for deputies as finding and stopping the shooter rather than securing the scene, reports The Miami Herald.

“Everyone should have gone in,” said a source who is allegedly familiar with the agency’s response to the shooting. “Every single person believed the shooter was in the building. You have to stop the threat.”

Before being appointed as commander, Jordan was assigned to BSO’s civil division, which serves subpoenas and injunctions. She was previously employed by the Fort Lauderdale Police Department where Broward Sheriff Scott Israel also worked. She remains in command of her district.

BSO has neither confirmed nor denied that Jordan issued a stand-down order, but Israel previously bashed Deputy Scot Peterson, who was a resource officer at the school, for not entering the building during the shooting.

Police officers rarely use force in apprehending suspects, and when they do they seldom cause significant injuries to those arrested, according to a multi-site study published in the March issue of the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery.

According to Ronal Serpas, the department’s chief at the time, one of the tools used by the New Orleans Police Department to identify members of gangs like 3NG and the 39ers came from the Silicon Valley company Palantir. The company provided software to a secretive NOPD program that traced people’s ties to other gang members, outlined criminal histories, analyzed social media, and predicted the likelihood that individuals would commit violence or become a victim. As part of the discovery process in Lewis’ trial, the government turned over more than 60,000 pages of documents detailing evidence gathered against him from confidential informants, ballistics, and other sources — but they made no mention of the NOPD’s partnership with Palantir, according to a source familiar with the 39ers trial.

The program began in 2012 as a partnership between New Orleans Police and Palantir Technologies, a data-mining firm founded with seed money from the CIA’s venture capital firm. According to interviews and documents obtained by The Verge, the initiative was essentially a predictive policing program, similar to the “heat list” in Chicago that purports to predict which people are likely drivers or victims of violence.

The partnership has been extended three times, with the third extension scheduled to expire on February 21st, 2018. The city of New Orleans and Palantir have not responded to questions about the program’s current status.

Predictive policing technology has proven highly controversial wherever it is implemented, but in New Orleans, the program escaped public notice, partly because Palantir established it as a philanthropic relationship with the city through Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s signature NOLA For Life program. Thanks to its philanthropic status, as well as New Orleans’ “strong mayor” model of government, the agreement never passed through a public procurement process.

“NO ONE IN NEW ORLEANS EVEN KNOWS ABOUT THIS, TO MY KNOWLEDGE.” In fact, key city council members and attorneys contacted by The Verge had no idea that the city had any sort of relationship with Palantir, nor were they aware that Palantir used its program in New Orleans to market its services to another law enforcement agency for a multimillion-dollar contract.

Even James Carville, the political operative instrumental in bringing about Palantir’s collaboration with NOPD, said that the program was not public knowledge. “No one in New Orleans even knows about this, to my knowledge,” Carville said.

More than half a decade after the partnership with New Orleans began, Palantir has patented at least one crime-forecasting system and has sold similar software to foreign intelligence services for predicting the likelihood of individuals to commit terrorism.

Even within the law enforcement community, there are concerns about the potential civil liberties implications of the sort of individualized prediction Palantir developed in New Orleans, and whether it’s appropriate for the American criminal justice system.

Shaun King, a prominent black rights activist and writer, announced Thursday that he is co-founding a political action committee to help elect “reform-minded prosecutors” at the county and city levels.

The Real Justice PAC plans to spend upward of $1 million to support campaigns by progressives running for district attorney offices this year.

Rob Duke's insight:

Funded by George Soros, the attempt to change American justice moves to attack prosecutors. Cops have been an easy target, because they're not particularly well-organized nor do they have any professional association to protect them at the all levels of society. In contrast, prosecutors are part of the law profession whose members dominate politics and the courts of law. Given this, my guess is that activists will find it more difficult to attack prosecutors.

Having said this, many studies suggest that the problem with implicit bias in the justice system seems to be most impact by prosecution level decisions to file charges and not at the street cop level.

Police and other public employees have privacy rights and can't be fired for having an extramarital affair with a co-worker, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

Reinstating a damage suit by a former policewoman in the Placer County community of Roseville, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said supervisors could not punish her for off-duty sexual conduct unless it affected her work.

"We have long recognized that officers and employees of a police department enjoy a right of privacy in private, off-duty sexual behavior," Judge Stephen Reinhardt said in the 3-0 ruling, citing similar cases in 1983 and 1986.

For years, billionaire progressive philanthropist George Soros has been aiming to steer local elections in favor of certain candidates for district attorney— by infusing their campaigns with financial support from Soros-funded political action committees.

Leading from the front, the New York Police Department has begun exploring mechanisms to incorporate sentiment analysis — data about public perceptions — as a component of its flagship performance management system.

They are on to something important. The NYPD knows that it matters how members of the public feel about police services.

Police are dependent upon the support and cooperation of the public to be effective, and communities are likewise dependent upon the police to help create safe communities.

If you ask most police officers, they will tell you their role is simply to respond to police calls for service, fight crime, and arrest violators of the law as the intake process for the criminal justice system.

In this worldview, success is typically defined by numbers of arrests, citations, special initiatives. If crime rates are going down, and we are making a lot of contacts, citations, and arrests, we must be doing a great job.

However, ask most members of the public, and they will paint a very different picture.

They will invariably tell you they want to feel safe in their neighborhoods; they want police to be responsive to concerns they have about crime and other issues that negatively impact their quality of life. They want prompt and timely police services when they have been impacted by crime, and they want police to help them avoid becoming victims in the future. Anytime they come in contact with police, they want to be treated with dignity and respect.

The Boulder County district attorney's Brady list is a somewhat-secret roster that includes at least 13 current and former officers who have findings of untruthfulness or misconduct on their records that could weaken their credibility if called upon to testify as a witness in a jury trial.

“When I turn around boom, before I had a chance to get down on my knees,” Fernando Coronado, 47 years-old, said during a press conference with his attorney Robert Sykes.

During the press conference, Sykes showed the body cam video from one of the officers when the incident happened back on August 3, 2016 at an apartment complex in West Valley City located near 5700 W. and 2600 S.

The video shows a swarm of officers shouting at Coronado to come out of his apartment. When he steps out he’s naked from the waist up and he continues to walk back and forth. He then makes his way towards two officers and that when they shoot him with their tasers.

Coronado, who admits he was drunk, claims he was not lunging towards the officers but was in the process of going down to his knees when he was hit with the electric shock.

“ABSOLUTE sobriety is not a natural or primary human state,” asserts Richard Davenport-Hines at the beginning of this voluminous and comprehensive history of drug-taking. The evidence he produces is overwhelming. For the past three centuries (he barely glances at the previous two), humanity has found ever more ingenious and effective routes to oblivion. Until the second half of the 19th century, governments made little serious effort to intervene.

Apart from the ubiquitous desire to get stoned, the other constant attribute of the past is hypocrisy. Narcotics, it emerges, have always been a passion mainly of the upper classes and the lower orders. The first group tends to grumble about the debauchery of the second. There, for instance, is Samuel Taylor Coleridge demanding “legislative interference” because he was shocked by the quantities of laudanum (opium in alcohol) sold by country druggists to the poor. Rather rich from a man whom Dorothy Wordsworth described as “the slave of stimulants”.

However, he was not alone. Every familiar name in British history, it seems from Mr Davenport-Hines's painstaking research, was swallowing, sniffing or (after the helpful invention of the hypodermic syringe) injecting something. George IV's “ungovernable” affection for laudanum (and cherry brandy) horrified the increasingly prim middle classes: he needed 100 drops of laudanum before he could face Lord Aberdeen, the foreign secretary. William Wilberforce, scourge of slavers, ascribed to opium his powers of public speaking. Wilkie Collins described in his novels how boredom and the social stigma of alcohol consumption drove wealthy Victorian women to share his addiction to laudanum.

Hypocrisy marked Britain's approach to the drug trade in the 18th and 19th centuries. In spite of the scruples felt by William Ewart Gladstone, that puritanical prime minister, who sipped laudanum before appearing in the House of Commons, great trading barons such as the founders of Jardine Matheson made fortunes from shipping opium to China. In the 1890s, the British government was still dithering over allowing its colonies to export drugs.

A greater hypocrisy has coloured the 20th century's approach, and especially that of the United States. America was quick to ban the sale and consumption of heroin and cocaine: by 1919, it had even banned maintenance prescriptions by doctors to suffering addicts, something that Britain long allowed. And, while the British government was deeply reluctant to outlaw hashish in the 1920s, America pushed through an international agreement to do so. But drugs produced by pharmaceutical companies escaped such treatment. Barbiturates became one of the century's most popular drugs. American troops in Vietnam were fed huge quantities of amphetamines, in order to stimulate their fighting zeal. When President Nixon came to the White House and launched a “war” on drugs, American pharmaceutical companies were producing 8 billion amphetamines a year. The 1972 Vienna convention, which constrains national drug policies, treated such stimulants and depressants far more lightly than heroin, cocaine and marijuana.

Mr Davenport-Hines's prejudices are firmly on the side of the liberalisers. “Drugs remain dangerous, but they can also be rewarding to both suppliers and users; accordingly they remain ineradicable,” he argues. In a few final paragraphs, he suggests some wiser policies than the harsh criminalisation of the past 30 years that has over-crowded prisons with narcotics offenders and manifestly failed to alter people's drug habits.

"However, the allegations that Mr. Peterson was a coward and that his performance, under the circumstances, failed to meet the standards of police officers are patently untrue. Mr. Peterson is confident that his actions on that day were appropriate under the circumstances and that the video (together with the eye-witness testimony of those on the scene) will exonerate him of any sub-par performance," the statement said.

A video shows school resource deputy Scot Peterson during a school board meeting of Broward County, Fla. on Feb. 18, 2015. Broward County Public School via AP The statement quoted Peterson saying that when the gunfire first erupted, he "thought that the shots were coming from outside," which was why he "took up a tactical position."

Peterson was the first member of the Broward County Sheriff's Office to report the gunfire, DiRuzzo said. He also gave the local SWAT team keys to the building where the shooting happened, drew diagrams of the campus for them, and helped school administrators access security videos, DiRuzzo said.

Michael Christopher Mejia’s wasn’t the only demonstrative reaction in court on Friday.

Rob Duke's insight:

I'm not surprised by this. By transferring the ownership of conduct in the public space from the collective people, enforced by the police, to the criminal, we also give up the ability to discipline the enforcers.

A bad cop is only bad until we catch them, because when we strip them of their powers, they almost always fade into the background. However, that's not the case with the criminal. Even when we try to discipline them, they defy society.

I'd argue that we're better off having imperfect, but society controlled officers.

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals yesterday reversed a district court order to the FBI requiring that it surrender to the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and other groups more than 47,794 pages of documents relating to surveillance of Muslims.

It held that an agency may hold back any document if it can “establish a rational nexus between the withheld document and its authorized law enforcement activities,” without pointing to a particular law it is seeking to enforce.

Circuit Judge Andrew D. Hurwitz wrote the opinion vacating a summary judgment granted in 2015 to the ACLU by District Judge Richard Seeborg of the Northern District of California.

The issue was whether Exemption 7 of the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”)—which applies to “records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes”—justifies the FBI’s withholding of the documents. Seeborg held that the FBI had the burden of pointing to a particular law it is seeking to enforce in connection with any document that was not released, and failed to make that showing.

If you follow along down in the video below, you’ll be able to watch these individuals making their way through town as the officer decides to take his coffee and chuck it at one of the riders. From what the video tells us, the ride who it struck does say that his visor was up and the coffee was steaming hot. The comments on this one are flaring back and forth between people thinking that the rider had all of that and more coming his way with the way he was acting and others don’t think that this is the way that you would conduct yourself as an officer. After seeing the video below, be sure to tell us which side of the issue you side with.

Rob Duke's insight:

Cup makes a sound that is consistent with being an empty cup and not full of scalding coffee as the biker claims.

He also never makes any statements to that effect at the time and can be heard gleefully telling the cop: "I got you on camera, bro."

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